R.W. Johnson has published a book on the shooting-down of KAL 007. He now examines a rival account of the matter

Throughout the time I was working on my own book on the KAL 007 tragedy I heard reports that Seymour Hersh was working on a parallel book, and I looked forward to it keenly. Ever since he sprang to prominence with his exposure of the My Lai massacre 17 years ago I have read his writings with respect, sometimes with admiration. It is thus with some regret that I have to say that I found his KAL 007 book a very considerable disappointment. One hastens to add that Hersh has few rivals in the culling of Washington gossip; that his fame and pertinacity mean that many will talk to him who will not talk to others; and that his book includes much fascinating material on the technology and internal rivalries of the US intelligence world. I found myself informed, stimulated, nodding in agreement, with much of what he writes. But I was disappointed: his book is poorly organised; it omits a great deal of pertinent evidence; and, above all, he has accepted almost lock, stock and barrel a quite absurd explanation of how KAL 007, on its way from Anchorage, Alaska to Seoul in South Korea, came to be 365 miles off-course, deep over Soviet territory, when it was finally shot down with the loss of all 269 civilians aboard on 1 September 1983.

In essence, what Hersh has done is to rely heavily on one particular source, Jim Pfautz, the now retired head of USAF Intelligence (AFIN). Pfautz, indeed, is very much the hero of Hersh’s book, and the story that emerges often verges on a praise-song to Pfautz. That story – and for Hersh it is very much the story – is that AFIN concluded almost immediately that the Russians had misidentified KAL 007 as a US military reconnaissance plane, and had not realised that they were shooting down a civilian airliner. The other three intelligence agencies involved were the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). Largely due to the urgings of William Casey, who, as Director of Central Intelligence, is notionally in command of all three, these agencies lent themselves, initially at least, to the story favoured on purely ideological grounds by the leading hawks of the Reagan Administration: that the Russians had deliberately shot down what they had known to be a civilian airliner. Thus the scandal is, for Hersh, that this version of events – announced to the world by President Reagan and by Mrs Kirkpatrick at the UN, with an acute consequent increase in Cold War tensions – was propagated despite the existence of firm intelligence evidence that it was untrue.

This is, in several ways, a rather curious emphasis. It is, for a start, hardly news: as I pointed out in my own book, the fact that the Reagan Administration had knowingly ignored its own intelligence in making its accusations was public property only five weeks after the tragedy. One reason it gained so little publicity at the time was that attention was focused, not unreasonably, on the far more brutal fact of the shootdown itself – and on the $64,000 question: how on earth did KAL 007 come to be so far off-course in the first place?

To answer this question Hersh puts forward the theory of Captain Harold Ewing. By his own admission, Ewing set out to find a way of proving that 007’s deviation from course had to have been accidental. Fairly quickly he realised that none of the accidental scenarios posited by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) could explain the plane’s actual track. These scenarios he (rightly) abandoned. He then began devising ever more elaborate scenarios of his own to prove the deviation accidental. His work became known to those of us who were working on the same problem. But although there is no doubt about Ewing’s integrity and good faith, his speculations demanded that one accept far too many long-odds assumptions to be at all credible.

The version of events according to Ewing/Hersh is as follows. First, we have to assume that 007’s pilot decided, for reasons of his own, to scrap his computerised flight plan (the fact that his scribbles on that plan suggest that he then planned the route he actually took is ignored). Then, because that meant he was rushed, we assume he made ‘a monumental error’ about his fuel, taking on five extra tons of the stuff – enough to crash the plane had it been fully loaded. (But there was no rush – take-off was actually delayed for 40 minutes – and the pilot filled in one set of papers correctly, one incorrectly.) We then assume that the crew decided not to use the pre-programmed flight-plan cassette with which they had been issued, instead opting to program their three flight computers manually. We further assume that one of these computers was then wrongly programmed with a 10-degree error (we’re not just assuming a mistake but one very specific mistake – a 9-degree or 11-degree error won’t do), and when the other computers threw up their inevitable warning of this error, that the error was resolved by switching off the warning light and leaving the error intact. We then assume that the pilot, despite his reputation as KAL’s No 1 and a ‘human computer’, disregarded the obligatory checking procedure designed to ensure that the computers had been correctly programmed. Then we assume that the pilot, once aloft, made a further decision to switch over to control by his Inertial Navigational System (INS) without checking, as he should have, that he was actually on the right course.

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

SIR: In a subject as controversial as the Korean Airlines disaster, careful attention to facts is an essential starting-point. And although R.W. Johnson in his review of Seymour Hersh’s book (LRB, 23 October) asserted that he meant to ‘work academically from established facts’, my own investigations have convinced me that this has not happened. Instead, we have seen the manufacture of a flock of ‘factoids’ from which artificial logical structures are assembled. But those consequent structures are counterfeit, and the activity is a parody of true scholarship. An example of a factoid is Foot’s assertion, in his slavishly affectionate review for you of Johnson’s book Shootdown (LRB, 24 July), that there is a string of radio beacon stations arrayed continuously along the North Pacific airline flight path, and that automatic equipment aboard airliners receives these signals and instantly sounds a cockpit alarm if any course deviation occurs. No such string of beacons and no such automatic alarm exist.

Johnson uses similar factoids in his book and in his review. A few examples may demonstrate the flavour. The ‘fact’ that Captain Chun’s scribbles on the flight plan show he had pre-planned the course deviation is actually a factoid: Chun’s scribbles show reference to the Equal Time Point, where (usually for mechanical or passenger health emergencies) he could quickly press on to the nearest Japanese airport rather than return to Anchorage, and that ETP was exactly proper for the standard R-20 route – Johnson simply asserts (incorrectly) that it wasn’t. The ‘fact’ that Chun took on 10,000 extra pounds of fuel was originally a mistake, in that analysis of the loading manifests shows that there never was such an extra amount, but that Chun made an arithmetic error in one column of his figures; Hersh reports this, Johnson in his review misreports it, having obviously misunderstood the passage. The ‘company rules’ about using weather radar in the ‘ground-mapping mode’ is another factoid: there is no such rule. The ‘fact’ of evasive manoeuvres is a factoid, since the released Japanese radar data are entirely consistent with the announced KAL 007 manoeuvres, with proper consideration of inherent radar inaccuracies which Johnson evidently never understands (so the pilot was not ‘lying to his ground controllers’, nor had he ‘dived’, as Johnson claims – even a descent as reported by raw Japanese radar would have been on a one-degree angle, hardly a ‘dive’ for evasion).

Another major factoid is ‘the mystery of why 007 left paying cargo behind at Anchorage’. Here Johnson in his review of Hersh may have slipped across the hazy boundary between mere enthusiastic academic carelessness and intentional deception. There never was any such cargo, as has been demonstrated by experts and communicated to Johnson in correspondence many months ago. The mystery ‘1200 pounds’ (not 1800, as reported in his book) is labeled ‘6 D/H’, and was entered into one line in the weight manifest items, crossed out, and entered directly below in its proper location. It refers to the six ‘dead-heading’ (that is, staff passengers) KAL pilots and engineers on the flight. On this simple bookkeeping foul-up, Johnson has conjured up a picture of deliberate intention to prepare for ‘action’ – yet he neither checked with any aviation experts on this question, nor, when he had been personally told of the true innocent reason for the manifest citations, did he dispute it or attempt to rebut it. Instead, he promulgated it in your journal as if it were still a fact. I have prepared a 100-page critique of Shootdown which shows upwards of five hundred cases of such factoids and clear distortions: many involve mere careless ignorance, but many others involve key arguments and assertions. Johnson routinely twists documented evidence, makes up non-existent ‘expert testimony’, changes cited assertions and maps, reverses the meanings and intents of original sources, smears dissenters (such as myself), and in general completely and consistently confuses his evidence. The pattern is so overwhelming it seems impossible not to notice: see, for example, how Johnson twists and distorts my article in the January-February 1985 Defence Attaché.

James Oberg
Dickinson, Texas

R.W. Johnson writes: Mr Oberg, who describes himself as an ‘imagineer, triviologist and expert in astro folklore’, has been pursuing me for some time now, writing to newspapers, demanding to review my book, sending me abusive letters. I have repeatedly asked him for a copy of his long critique of Shootdown – to no avail. LRB readers must forgive me for not replying in detail to Mr Oberg’s points – his last letter to me sought my help in his quest to have me fired from my job.